“It was very akin to the process of putting together a dinner party,” she said. “You want to make sure everyone is contributing something valuable to the whole mix; you need people with different approaches to making art in order to produce a rich experience both within and outside the gallery.”

Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, opening Thursday, Feb. 16 and running through June 10, engages audiences with the integral role that meals have played in artistic expression, dialogue, and progress since the early 20th century. Feast will offer viewers a number of ways to experience the installation—through permanent pieces on display in the Smart Museum’s gallery, and through an assortment of interactive elements and public events set in the museum and across Chicago.

Fifty-five years ago, well before his appointment as Dean of the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, Daniel Shannon shipped out to Seattle for his U.S. Army assignment at the port of embarkation for troops heading to or from the Far East—Fort Lawton in Seattle, Wash.

Shannon, who operated a broadcast network for the base hospital, recently spoke to a group of former servicemen and servicewomen gathered on campus for a Veterans Day breakfast on Friday, Nov. 11. Shannon described his own service story and talked about his father-in-law, a World War II vet who was aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Bunker Hill during the Battle of Okinawa.

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Among the nearly 50 veterans and guests who came to hear Shannon’s talk in the Social Sciences Research Building was Paul Strieleman, Senior Lecturer in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division. A United States Air Force veteran, Strieleman said he and other fellow veterans don’t have many opportunities to discuss their service with each other. “We like to joke about it, talk about it, just talk about some of the crazy things we did,” he said, “but we don’t talk about war that much.”